JAKARTA Paintings claimed to be by Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and other celebrated European artists were to be auctioned at a Jakarta hotel on Friday, amid a furore over their authenticity.
According to an AFP report, organizers and experts have been engaged in a heated controversy over the planned auction of the paintings, which also includes works allegedly by Goya, Renoir and Degas as well as famed Indonesian painter Affandi.
One of the organizers, Sulebar Sukarman, said his side was not interested in the issue of authenticity, but insisted that the paintings were "old." "What matters is whether the paintings are valuable or not, whether they have aesthetic value or not," Sukarman was quoted as saying by the Kompas daily.
But he failed to explain why the auction catalogue attributed the works to the famous artists, whose paintings normally fetch millions of dollars.
The owner of the paintings J. Syahdam, claimed no one could determine the authenticity of the works.
"Even foreign collectors would not be able to determine their authenticity. They can only guess," he said.
Syahdam said some of the paintings had been left behind by Dutch officers who left Indonesia during the Independence War.
The auction will offer for example Van Gogh's "Two Corn's Farmers" authentic or not at between 4,000 dollars and 2.5 million dollars, and a "Renoir" Girl With a Flower at between one and two million dollars.
RC Midelti, a member of an expert team who was assigned to verify the paintings to be auctioned, said most of the works attributed to Picasso, Goya, Miller and Renoir, were fake.
"I urge that those paintings not to be auctioned," he said.
He called on the organizers to have experts in Paris and Amsterdam verify the authenticity of the paintings before offering them in an action.
Expert Agus Darmawan told the Jakarta Post the proposed auction was "the biggest scandal in modern Indonesian art."